At the beginning of every academic year, we
try to deal with the basic questions of
life, and particularly the most basic one of
all, why are we here, why are we
alive?
And through the year, it is obvious that
we as a group believe that the Christian
explanation of reality is the true one.
But there are reasons why we believe that.
And so at the beginning of every academic
year, we try to look at those reasons.
And you remember that about three weeks ago,
we felt that a first question that you
ought to deal with when you're dealing with
the whole issue of why we're alive is,
is there anybody who originated the whole thing
who might be able to give us some
clue as to why he put us here?
And we dealt therefore with the question, is
there a God?
And you remember that we concluded with people
like Einstein and Darwin that that is the
most reasonable explanation for the existence of our
world, of the universe, the order and design
in our world and the universe, and particularly
the most reasonable explanation of us, personable people
that we are, and particularly of the existence
of our conscience within us that is always
making us want to be better than we
actually are.
And then you remember that two weeks ago,
we dealt with the whole question, what is
this God like if he exists?
And we talked about the various sources of
information on that that we have in the
Greek and Roman myths, in the Eastern religions,
Buddhism, Mohammedanism, in Confucianism.
And we came to the conclusion that intellectually,
none of them have the kind of information
that we have in this collection of books
here, because all the other religions are based
on the subject of personal opinions of a
man or of a woman as to what
God is like.
But this collection of books contain historical records
of what our Creator did and said over
2,000 to 4,000 years of history.
And we concluded that this was some of
the most reliable history compared with that of
the ancient writings that we have in our
world.
Now, you remember then last week, we tried
to deal with the incredible information that is
included in the last quarter of that book.
The information about a human being like ourselves
who lived for about 33 or 35 years
in Galilee and who kept on saying that
he was alive with God, the Creator, before
the universe was made.
And kept on saying that he was really
the son of our Maker.
He was our Creator living here on earth.
And you remember that we examined critically, I
think, that claim last week and talked about
the fact that he doesn't have the marks
of derangement and imbalance in his life that
maniacs or lunatics have.
But indeed, he is looked upon as the
pattern of a balanced life.
We talked about his sinlessness and the fact
that he had power over nature and power
over disease.
Then you may remember, finally, we talked about
the incredible event of the resurrection.
So that in spite of there being many
imitations of resurrection and many experiences of controlled
breathing and people being buried alive and pretending
they came alive again, there is no event
so substantiated as the resurrection of Jesus.
It stands unchallenged after more stringent and more
demanding legal and sociological and historical analysis and
examination than any other event.
And so you remember last Sunday we said
that if any man is the son of
the Maker of the universe, it is this
man Jesus.
It's reasonable to believe that this man is
who he said he was.
And really what I would ask you to
do this Sunday is to look at him
and ask what he told us about our
lives and about reality.
And loved ones, if you conclude intellectually that
he is God's son, do you see that
you have no alternative but to do what
he says?
I mean, it's just good common sense.
And so once you take that step and
say he is the son of God, you
can't hold back from the next step, which
is obviously, let me find out what he
wants me to do.
Because you know that's what you'd do if
I said that.
If I said to you, I am the
son of our Maker.
I existed with the Creator that made you
before the universe was ever created.
I know why we're here.
My Father has explained it all to me.
You know you would say, tell me, tell
me, what does your Father think of me?
Explain to me what should I do with
my life?
What's the meaning of it all?
And that's what I'd ask is just to
listen to today Jesus' own explanation of what
life is about.
And I have not found any better terms
than the terms that we've shared before.
That Jesus said very plainly, first of all,
all of you are not going to last
more than 70 or at the most 80
years.
That that which is born of the flesh
is flesh.
You have a mind and you have emotions
and a body.
And Jesus said they're not going to last
beyond 70 or 80 years.
You're not going to stay alive any longer
than the parents or the grandparents that gave
you that mental and physical life.
You're not.
Of course, our reason reinforces that.
You are more dead now than you were
when I started this sentence.
You are.
There are millions of cells in you that
have died even since I started that sentence.
And you may plead, oh, but aren't there
others being renewed?
Yes, but fewer than are dying.
And you come to that point in life
and believe me, you're all past it when
you're losing more than you're gaining.
And you can see the signs of it
in graying hair and in wrinkles and in
pains where you didn't have pains before.
And Jesus said it's all proof that you're
not going to last forever in your present
state.
Your mental and physical life is already dying.
And then he said a strange thing.
You just won't believe that.
That's what he said once.
He said they will not believe that.
You just won't believe that.
You refuse to believe it because there's something
inside you that says, no, no, I wasn't
made to stay here for 70 or 80
years and then go out like a light.
I wasn't.
I was made to last longer than that.
And there is something in this, isn't it?
It's strange that our reason opposes it, but
there's something in us that feels we were
made to last longer than that.
And we will not believe Jesus' words that
our present mental and physical life won't last
longer than that.
And so, of course, we fight against it.
You know we do.
And we feel, no, we're made to experience.
We don't even know the word eternity, but
we feel it's like that.
We were made to live forever.
We're made to experience the security of eternity.
We're made here to experience the safety of
security, of eternity.
We're made to experience the stability of eternity.
No, somehow we're not made to be fiddlers
on a roof.
And yet, you know, all of us feel
we are.
Wall Street shakes and we all shake.
Iran stops exporting oil and we all run
scared.
We know that there's great uncertainty in this
life.
And we feel it ourselves.
We feel it in our own waywardness and
our own lack of tenacity.
And so, you know what we do.
We try to get that stability.
We try to get that security.
And we try to take the attributes of
a purely temporary mental and physical life and
we try to parley them into the attributes
of life as we think it should be.
And so, you know what happens.
We get the education and we try to
exchange the degree for the best job possible.
Not so that we can serve humanity, most
of us, or so that we can make
the world a better place, but so that
we can get more money, so that we
can live with some kind of stability and
some kind of security.
And then, you know, as the years pass,
we try to trade up our cars and
our houses to somehow try to get some
security into our life and some sense of
stability.
And then we try to get the best
life insurance and medical package that we can,
hoping that somehow we'll be able to guard
against these uncertainties that make life so shaky
and uncertain.
And then we try to get a good
position in our jobs.
We try to establish ourselves in a position
where those underneath us can't undermine us.
And we try to establish our stability in
relationship to our colleagues or against the interests
of our rivals.
So, of course, life becomes a very anxious
process because you're always trying to make yourself
stable and secure.
And however far we go in that, we're
always haunted by that figure with the haggard
face and the long hair and the beard
who was carried out of that hotel room
and then died on the way to the
hospital.
And we're haunted by that character because, of
all people, Howard Hughes did it better than
any of us.
He did it better.
He owned more millions than we will probably
ever own.
He did more to establish security and stability
and eternity here on earth than anybody could
and then we probably will ever do.
And yet at the end, he found he
couldn't protect himself against the bacteria and the
weaknesses that show us that we're only temporarily
here.
You know, it's the same with the whole
business of happiness.
Somehow we feel we were made for an
eternal experience.
And we feel we were made for the
serenity and the peace and the exhilaration of
eternity.
And we feel that somehow we should experience
that serenity and peace of Walden Pond and
then it should be combined with all the
wild excitement of the Arabian Nights.
And somehow it should be possible to get
a South Sea island where we can feel
all that.
And so we try to feel it.
And you know we do.
We try to use experiences and try to
use relationships to somehow extract from life that
mixture of wild excitement and of great serenity
and peace that we feel we were made
for.
And yet, however many relationships we use, however
many people we prostitute, however many experiences we
try to produce, however much we try to
calm our anxiety chemically, yet at the end
of it all we're left with a sense
of emptiness and loneliness instead of the sense
of conviviality and excitement and exhilaration that we
think we should have.
And we're left with a kind of anticlimax
and you might almost say a sense of
desolation instead of the happiness and the excitement
of eternity.
And it's the same with who we are.
I don't know that there's one of us
here that doesn't feel a bit like Milton,
you know, that we were born for some
great thing.
And we do.
We feel it deep down, don't we?
Every one of us.
You think you're the only one who feels
it, but the person beside you feels it.
You think you're more individual than me, but
you're not.
I feel I'm more individual than you.
We all feel the same.
We all feel we're very different and we
all have different little twists that make us
special.
And we feel we are special and we
are significant and we are important.
And somebody must know we're here.
Somebody must know that we've passed through this
veil of tears.
Somebody must know what we've done.
Somebody somewhere somehow must know us ourselves.
And yet we have a terrible feeling that
nobody does.
And the gold watch on retirement day is
a kind of sweet sour thing, you know.
We joke about it and yet we have
a funny feeling that that's probably all we'll
mean to those that we work with over
30 or 40 years.
And we are kind of surprised that however
much we try to will ourselves into positions
of importance, and we do that, don't we?
We try to will ourselves into a place
of importance.
We try to will other people to recognize
us and to look to us and think
of us.
We throw our weight around at home.
We throw our weight around at the office.
We exercise our authority in ways we ought
not to in order to try to get
somebody to notice us.
Somebody to realize we are somebody.
And yet after it's all done, we're kind
of surprised at how quickly they've forgotten John
Wayne.
And he was pretty famous.
And how quickly they forget Bing Crosby.
And how quickly they forget Jack Benny.
And how quickly they forget John F.
Kennedy.
And we're not nearly as well known as
them.
And you wonder, well, how will we become
known?
And loved ones, what Jesus said was, don't
you see you're trying the impossible?
That the life that you've got now is
not eternal life.
And you're trying to make it into eternal
life by your own efforts and you can't
do it.
The mental and physical life that you have
is going to die and be finished and
go into a grave after 70 or 80
years and that's it.
And it'll just be a name on a
gravestone and nothing better than that.
And that's all you'll receive.
And what you're trying to do is somehow
to take the attributes of what is a
purely temporal life and you're trying to make
them into the attributes of eternal life.
And you can't get blood out of a
stone because a stone is not alive.
And you can't extract from a dead inanimate
thing, like mental and emotional life, the life
blood that makes life eternal, however much you
try.
And of course, all most of us have
succeeded in trying is making ourselves into monsters.
That's what we do.
We pervert ourselves into egotistical, hedonistic monsters that
are domineering and manipulating all the time.
And of course, what Jesus says is, you
see those feelings that you have, those aspirations,
those feelings that you should have the security
of an eternity, those feelings that there is
a happiness beyond what you've experienced, those feelings
that you have that you should be able
to break out of the earthbound existence that
you're in.
Those feelings are there because that's right.
That's true.
You were made to live forever.
You were made to be important.
You were made to be happy beyond your
dreams.
You were made not to have to fear
whether Iran cuts off the oil or whether
you lose your job.
You were made for eternity.
That's what Jesus says.
But he says it's a gift.
It's a gift.
You have this body, this physical life, and
inside it you have your psychological being, your
mind and emotions and your will.
And inside that again, if you can talk
about inside at all in regard to this
subject, you have spirit.
You have a part of you that is
sending up all those aspirations.
And that spirit is at the moment dead.
And that's why you feel such emptiness.
And the reason you can't fill it is
you're trying to get at it from a
mental and emotional and physical level and you
can't.
And what Jesus said was the only way
that spirit can come alive and give life
to your mind and emotions and to your
body so that you live forever is if
the person who made you brings that spirit
of yours alive by the action and the
energizing of his own eternal life.
And that's the only way it'll ever come
about.
And Jesus said that's a gift.
That gift of life from my Father is
something that God has to give you.
And when he gives you it, everything comes
alive inside you.
And your mind and emotions begin to work
right and your body begins to operate right
and you stop trying to squeeze out of
people and other things life.
You begin to have life inside.
And you begin to sense the real joy
of the love of the one significant other
in the whole universe that he is your
own personal father and that he knows your
name and that he's put you here for
a special purpose and you begin to sense
your identity in this universe.
And you begin to feel most of all
of course that he will not see you
go down in the dirt.
That he will be right there every moment
whatever Iran does or whatever the stock market
does.
And Jesus said this is a gift but
the Father will give it only to those
of us who cannot and will not find
it elsewhere.
And that's what Jesus said.
That you can't serve God and mammon.
That you can't be going to establish your
version of security by exercising your greed and
exercising your covetousness and trying to gather around
yourself all the little nuts and stocks and
shares that you possibly can to hedge your
bets.
That you can't do that.
You can't be grabbing at every human being
you want to try to have an exciting
experience of exhilaration with them whatever it costs
them.
You can't do that.
You can't be domineering others and requiring them
to respect you and exercising your pride and
your envy and your domination over them.
You can't be getting that kind of thing
from this world and also expect God to
give you real eternal life.
Jesus said it's either one or the other.
And many of us I know say well
I mean I want to do that.
I really do.
I want to trust God as my Father
for my security.
I do.
But when the bank balance goes down there's
a little fear goes through me.
And I want to trust him but I
do find myself grabbing at other ways to
rectify that.
I do want to enjoy God.
I see what a beautiful morning he's made
this morning.
I want to enjoy him.
He must be brighter than the sunshine.
I want to know him.
I do.
But I find that when I can get
some quick thrill or quick exhilaration or quick
happiness from a human being I find there's
something inside me that goes that way.
And Jesus said that's right.
You as you are at the moment can
do nothing else but try to get eternal
life from this temporal life.
Your present personality has become so perverted that
it can do nothing else.
But why do you think I died?
I didn't die just to bribe God to
overlook your sins.
That's not why I died.
I died to express the miracle that my
Father worked in eternity for you.
He foresaw the way you would develop and
he took that perverted personality of yours and
he put it into me in eternity and
he destroyed it there.
And that's what we were both expressing on
Calvary.
And your old self was crucified actually with
me but crucified with me indeed in eternity.
And you have a whole new personality from
my Father's hand that can be activated this
very moment if you believe me.
And this personality that comes from my Father
and comes from my resurrection is able to
trust God for security.
This new personality is able to be satisfied
with my Father's friendship even if it is
friendship from no other human being.
This personality is satisfied with the importance that
it receives from my Father's attention.
And this personality can come alive in you
this very day if you are willing to
turn from seeking these things from the world.
Stop trying to manufacture your own version of
eternal life and I will make real in
you a personality that can receive eternal life
from my Father.
And that's why Jesus said you really have
to be born again.
You have a mental and physical life that
you got when you were born first time
but your spirit needs to come alive.
You need to be born again and there's
a new version of you that can be
born in you this day.
Loved ones that's what Jesus says.
That you ought to analyze and you ought
to think and you ought to use your
critical faculties.
But after all that is done what is
needed is a complete change in you.
A complete new birth.
A new person has to be created in
you.
And Jesus said that that's possible because of
the destruction of the old person in his
death and the fact that when he rose
from the dead God resurrected the whole human
race new and created it new.
And there is a personality of yours that
is available to you that is able to
know God as his own friend and father.
And loved ones actually all you need to
do is believe that and turn away from
your version of eternal life.
If you say to me you mean no
savings, no stocks and shares, no friends.
Sure you know I don't mean that.
Jesus had those things.
Jesus had friends.
Jesus had a coat.
He had shoes.
Sure you need some of those things but
you know fine well what we're talking about.
We're talking about when you go beyond that
and you begin to try to get your
security from those things or you depend on
your friends for your happiness.
That's where it's wrong.
And Jesus says if you will stop doing
that and you will do what I do
which is look to my father for the
only life that I ought to have.
And I was content with whatever life he
gave me and didn't ask for more than
he was willing to give me.
If you will do that then his spirit
will come into yours and make you alive
to him.
And that's why you're here on earth.
And loved ones that's why we're here.
If I could just say even to those
of you who are college people, it goes
quickly.
It does.
I mean it's amazing.
It goes fast.
And it just seems yesterday that I thought
I was 17 and I'd gone up to
university and I thought oh I have all
the time in the world to get this
thing sorted out.
And that honestly seems like yesterday.
And so the rest of us would say
the same thing.
It goes very fast.
And of course none of us can tell
how long we have really.
None of us can tell how long we
have to think about these things.
And then could I just say this to
you.
I know some of my dear friends who
were thinking about it when they were 17
and they're still thinking about it.
It's very interesting to see those of us
who hear about it for the first time
and respond immediately.
We come through and we live that way.
But those of us who hear about it
and decide to think about it or to
wait for a more convenient season, we're still
standing at the railway station in the same
place 40 years later.
So be wise will you.
Don't think that you have forever.
You haven't.
You have 70 or if at the most
80 years and probably now you have at
the most 30 or 40 years.
And who knows whether you do have 30
or 40 years.
But the reason you're here and I'm here
on earth is to get to know this
dear maker of ours and to allow his
spirit to make our spirits alive so that
we can live with him forever.
Dear Father, we thank you for Jesus, for
the unbelievable pain that he was willing to
bear.
We thank you for your love for us.
And Lord, we want to be real with
you this morning.
And Father, we do see that much of
our attempt at imitating eternity has come to
nothing in our own lives and has in
a sense made us incapable even of ordinary
life.
And Lord, we see the truth that you
have set before us during your lifetime.
That there's only one place to receive life
that goes on forever and that has a
quality of eternity as well as a quantity.
And that is from our maker who originally
give us this temporal life.
So Father, we would turn to you.
We would ask you to show us what
we need to turn from in order to
receive your gift of a spirit and to
be made alive to you and to begin
to know you and begin to be able
to relate to you.
Father, show us where we have to stop
doing certain things so that we can come
alive in your Holy Spirit.
We ask you, our Father, to work with
us as we think and pray this through.
And we ask you most of all to
make it real to us by the power
of your spirit.
Lord Jesus, we would welcome you in as
the person that you are and as our
dear friend and our Savior.
And we would give our lives to you
now and expect you to give us directions
each day so that we may be what
you and your Father made us to be.
We now commit ourselves to you, Lord.
As you committed your life for us, we
commit ours to you for your glory and
for your service.
And now the grace of our Lord Jesus
and the love of God and the fellowship
of the Holy Spirit be with each one
of us now and evermore.
Amen.